"22 Jump Street" directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller are on a mission. They are between takes on a football scene for their comedy sequel, being shot at New Orleans' Tad Gormley Stadium in City Park. But even though the cameras are stopped, the filmmakers are still hard at work. Their mission: strategic reverse psychology.

"We are here to lower expectations," Lord announced, sitting down to chat about the film. "You need to go back and write all about how you're not really sure. You think maybe it might not be that good."

As they both often do, Miller picks up and continues Lord's thought: "Everything we've ever done has been riding on low expectations. 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs?' What a terrible idea. Doing '21 Jump Street' as a movie? Terrible idea. 'The Lego Movie'? Sounds like a terrible idea. If people think this is a good idea, we're screwed."

If that's the case, then Lord and Miller are definitely in trouble with "22 Jump Street." Because all three of those previous projects -- low though the expectations were -- ended up being unqualified box-office hits.

Long story short: After the surprisingly robust $200-plus million earned by the New Orleans-shot "21 Jump Street," Lord and Miller aren't going to be sneaking up on anybody any time soon. That's not stopping them from trying, though.

"We all know that sequels are terrible, right?" Miller asks.

"Yeah," Lord adds, "who wants to see a dumb sequel?"

Second verse, worst than the first?

Columbia Pictures executives, for starters, are hoping a lot of people are interested in Lord and Miller's "dumb" sequel. So as hard as the directors work to lower expectations, they remain stubbornly high this time.

They're high for the studio, which slotted "22 Jump Street" for a coveted mid-summer's weekend. (It opens on Friday, June 13.) It's also high for fans, who fully embraced Lord and Miller's 2012 original, "21 Jump Street," a comic take on the 1980s police procedural about youthful-looking police officers sent undercover to investigate crimes at high schools, on college campuses and other settings populated by teens and young adults.

Helping to raise the expectations even further is the return of stars Jonah Hill (who has been nominated for two Oscars since shooting "21 Jump Street") and Channing Tatum (who is Channing Tatum).

Hill and Tatum's presence aside, the real stroke of genius with "21 Jump Street" was the inspired but out-of-the-blue idea of turning it all into a crass goofball comedy. Even the most doubtful of fans -- and there were plenty of those when the very idea of a "21 Jump Street" movie was first announced -- had to admit that it paid off wonderfully.

Here's the problem: While "21 Jump Street" had the element of surprise on its side, "22 Jump Street" arrives as a known quantity, at least tonally. So how they can all make sure their sequel isn't destined to disappoint, the way so, so many sequels do?

As the final scenes of the first film suggested, Hill and Tatum's characters will enroll in college this time, after doing high school in "21 Jump Street." But Hill, who helped write and produce "22 Jump Street" in addition to starring, acknowledged that's not nearly enough to ensure a good movie.

In fact, Hill, Tatum, Lord and Miller all admitted they were initially reluctant to do a sequel since follow-ups are so often nowhere near as good as the movie that inspired them. Studio executives, on the other hand, weren't quite so shy. In fact, Hill said, Columbia Pictures muckety-mucks -- recognizing the hit potential from the get-go -- came to New Orleans to talk about the sequel possibilities before the first "Jump Street" had even wrapped.

Without realizing it, those same studio executives provided Hill and company with the inspiration for "22 Jump Street."

"In the first one, we called ourselves out for the lameness of recycling an idea for a TV show into a film, and I think that worked to our benefit," said Hill (still in full football pads for a scene in which his and Tatum's characters try out for the fictional MC State collegiate football team). "We call ourselves out right out of the gate on this one that sequels are bigger and crappier than the first ones. And so that's kind of the approach we're taking with this: to ... attack ourselves for making a sequel in the first place."

Big action, stupid jokes

A prime example of the comedic strategy of "22 Jump Street" can be seen in the film's trailer, when Nick Offerman -- playing a member of the police department brass -- informs Hill and Tatum's bumbling cop characters that they'll be going undercover once more as part of the so-called "Jump Street" program.

"Nobody cared about the 'Jump Street' reboot, but you got lucky," Offerman says in a not-so-veiled reference to the surprise success of the first film. "So now this department has invested a lot of money to make sure 'Jump Street' keeps going."

Substitute the word "studio" for "department" in that scene, and you see where this is headed.

Hill says that brand of meta humor, in which they poke fun at the very movie in which they are appearing, is among the script's running jokes.

"The basic idea is like from 'Bad Boys I' to 'Bad Boys II,'" Hill said. "The initial thought when I first was starting to write the first movie was 'Bad Boys' meets a John Hughes movie. And then the only way to make fun of ourselves in this movie properly is that sequels are more expensive and (less entertaining) than the first ones.

"And so the idea is that, and what I think the guys have really been pulling off -- Phil and Chris -- is that it really does feel like a big, giant movie but with really stupid jokes in it. Which is kind of great. Which is super-entertaining, hopefully."

So, yes, you can expect more oversized, "Bad Boy II"-style action sequences than in the first "Jump Street." (Notably, the production shut down the Port of New Orleans for a day to shoot a huge action sequence that Tatum said he won't soon forget. "I straight-up got to ride on a semi at like 90 mph on top of it," he said. "It was crazy.")

Those bigger action sequences, however, are just one way "22 Jump Street" tries to give fans more of what they loved so much about the first film -- but with enough new ideas in the mix to keep it from feeling like it's just repeating itself.

So, you can expect a continuation of the on-screen bromance between Hill and Tatum's characters (which mirrors their real-life friendship, as it does that between Lord and Miller). But they insist audiences can expect more.

Back to school

While Tatum and Hill were shy about providing too many details that might spoil the fun for moviegoers, they did acknowledge that the film's college setting (starring the Tulane University campus as Metro City State college) proved fertile when it came time to dream up new challenges for their characters to face.

"(My character)thinks it's going to be an extension of high school, and I think it's obvious because Jenko hates reading, he knows that there's ultimately going to have to be reading in college," Tatum said. " ... And why you'd want to go to college to begin with -- to have sex with the girls, go to spring break, that stuff -- I don't think we're giving too much away with that stuff, but uh, there might be that. Maybe."

Jonah Hill, left, and Channing Tatum are back in action as two bumbling cops who go undercover as college kids in the New Orleans-shot comedy sequel '22 Jump Street.' (Glen Wilson / Columbia Pictures)

All of that, Hill said, was another reason he ultimately decided to say yes to a "Jump Street" sequel.

"There hasn't been a great college movie of our generation yet," Hill said. "There have been 'Animal House' and all these great college movies, but there hasn't been a really memorable one from around now. I thought, when you take all the rules of high school away from these guys and put them in college, that seems a lot more comedically fertile. So I was like, OK, that could actually be funnier or as funny as the first one.

Tatum added: "Because people kind of want it, but they want it how they remember it -- and you want to give them something different. So you have to take some risks and what not and hope they like it."

On the plus side, Hill admitted, it's nice to do a sequel because -- given the success of the first film -- there's a built-in audience that is excited about visiting once more with their already-established characters. That removes a lot of the pressure of making a film. The question on opening weekend isn't whether "22 Jump Street" will do well at the box office. It will. Rather, the question is how well it will do.

If it repeats the success of the first one, is there a chance audiences can expect a "23 Jump Street" down the road? Once again, it's all about expectations.

"Well, everyone will really expect the third one to suck," Hill said. "So then you can only do better than the expectations."